Fortune Is a Woman by Francine Saint Marie Page A

today Venus had had it with work, with Soloman-Schmitt bullshit, with her new, quiet, desolate, out of sight, out of mind, hermetically sealed office digs on the fifteenth floor, where she was now three whole floors from VP Beaumont and certainly falling, if not in reality then definitely in spirits, and tumbling, tumbling, tumbling steadily toward the moon if fascist Paula Treadwell could have her way, and probably she was getting her way because the woman who should have been kissed and wasn’t, wasn’t, WASN’T, was gone again, gone as ordered, no doubt, kissing Paula’s ass, doing Paula’s bidding like the royal coward she really was, like a, like a, like a rook or a bishop or even a petty pawn on Paula’s chessboard, or like a despicable creature, too, a spineless and despicable creature hiding its frightened, despicable, spineless, lily-white ass in a fancy shell somewhere, or like the slick presidential wanna-be she was destined to be, thinking only of her pristine bureaucratic self, her princely future, her corporate reputation, posturing to become king of the shitheap, the most-likely-to that everyone was talking about these days, at the water cooler, at the club, everyone constantly jabbering about Lydia Beaumont, the goody-goody do-good girl, daddy’s little girl, daddy–and she probably still calls him daddy–being the first to train her for a brilliant career in ass kissing, and now work life consisted only of work, of tidbits of news, the rampant rumors and speculations that said soon the woman would be kissing the board’s ass, too, instead of just Paula’s, corporate gossip that could still be heard on the fifteenth desert island floor where she had been marooned for fifty-eight days, count them: fifty-eight MISERABLE days without sustenance, without so much as a fucking phone call, without receiving a single message, without a single message returned, not at the office, not at home, not on her cell, not even an e-mail, and here she was having to leave town again for Overseas Operations, wanting to call the woman, but her highness was just so aloof and above it all, the simplest things so beneath her, didn’t even have a cell phone, and soon there would be a plane to board, soon, too soon, flying into the sunset without saying goodbye, yet another month passing like the others before it, and how many more to come after that, who knows, and this time toiling thousands of miles away and not being missed at all, not being kissed, and the whole wide world was beginning to feel like a boundless desert island and she couldn’t help but wish she had never, NEVER come to work for Soloman-Schmitt and especially never, never, NEVER for that piece of shit, heartless, high and mighty Lydia Beaumont, and she missed her highness terribly, missed the vanishing on-again, off-again, the ever so handsome and distinguished Valentine Duchess–there she said it, at least in her mind–and once, just once, it would have been so nice to have come home to Sebastion, to find him chilling at home, waiting for her with his smooth smile and his hot hands, to have had dinner all laid out for her instead of the microwave whatever crap she was forced to content herself with in his absence, or it could have been totally rad to have seen some tall summer drinks with paper umbrellas sitting out on the patio, ready to be sipped from colorful crazy straws, old jazz booming from the stereo, silk ropes, toy cuffs, early bed. She could have tolerated anything tonight, put up with anything at all, but the goddamned empty penthouse.
    The conversation with her mother had only added to her despair.
    _____
     
    “Beaumont, why don’t you have a cell phone?”
    “I hate them.”
    “Get a beeper then.”
    “Paula, I’ve got to meet my father. What’s wrong now?”
    “Angelo’s leaving for Tokyo in a few days. She’ll be gone a month.”
    Another Treadwell trap? “And…?”
    “She’s in a slump or something. Call her and wish her